Preparation for theme 6

I read the research paper "Young Bilinguals' Language Behaviour in Social Networking Sites: The Use of Welsh on Facebook", published in the April 2013 issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (impact factor 1.778).

The authors Cunliffe, Morris & Prys investigated the use of Welsh as a minority language in the social networking site Facebook.

The research makes use of a selection of a one year long study from 2010 among four schools in northern and southern Wales. The study itself contained both quantitative and qualitative methods, starting off with an extensive questionnaire and then further narrowing it down to small focus group discussions among the students of these four schools.

This is in contrast to what me and some peers of this course have previously talked about in how qualitative methods would be good to set up a quantitative study, where results would then be used in a verifying way. That way you would be able to catchup a wide range of questions for the questionnaire, minimizing missed opportunities or results.

And so I think one limitation is in the order of method use in the study that is referenced in the paper, because as the authors say themselves, the answers from the students were self-reported. In connection to this, the authors argue that the increased sample size of the questionnaire made it possible to verify the answers of the focus group.

However, had they created the questionnaire after actually talking face-to-face to the students, I think they would have been in a much stronger position to verify the focus group answers simply because they by then would know what answers that were conflicting among the students.

I did learn, however, how you could construct a study of a subject that, ideally (as the authors put it) would have been conducted using very private sources (private communications) yet keep it fully anonymous.

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Select a media technology research paper that is using the case study research method. The paper should have been published in a high quality journal, with an “impact factor” of 1.0 or above. Your tasks are the following:

1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.

One can compare a case study with a focus group that you wish to interview / discuss with to find nuances and perspectives of a certain research problem that you have presented for them. However, the focus group in this example can be an entire organization, one person or other. A case study is also typically followed for a longer amount of time than a typical focus group session. Eisenhardt (1989) explains how a case study utilizes the data from different research methods, be it qualitative or quantitative. She writes that case studies can help provide description, test theory or generate theory.

2. Use the "Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research" (Eisenhardt, summarized in Table 1) to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your selected paper.

I read the article "Public Service Broadcasting's Participation in the Reconfiguration of Online News Content" from the April 2013 issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (impact factor 1.778), by Calvet, Montoya & García.

The authors base their paper on research conducted through an empirical study of five case studies (of public online news sites) in the European market.

I think the authors did a good job in defining a problem statement in terms of online participation possibilities, which could focus their research attention to this problem.

The authors picked five of the biggest European public service websites and compared them in terms of participatory options. From an intitial outlook one may think it would have been better to limit or randomize the sites, but selecting the largest countries and websites (cases) I think favors the statistical significance of the results.

Two samples were taken, one in a week's worth of news in early spring 2010, and the other in two days in May. These dates were carefully picked to avoid any major planned events. This in a way may have skewed the results of the case study, in my eyes, since perhaps it's not too imaginative to think that a news station may have more interactivity or participatory options for a big news item.

Literature on the subject confirmed results mentioned, such as the trend of user comments taking over the role previously held by forums and such. The quantiative data obtained helped answer the two research questions, but theoretical closure is a bit far off since the study could be complemented with more countries and public service news websites.